It’s long been believed the constantly rising costs of new home construction, and lackluster improvements in construction productivity more generally, are fundamentally a problem of production methods. Most houses in the US are still built on-site, using manual labor and hand tools, a manner of construction that doesn’t seem all that different from construction in the 19th century. By contrast, sectors like agriculture and manufacturing have shifted from this type of “craft production,” ...

I recently talked about using Thunderbird for reading RSS . In this I said: It’s not immediately obvious from the UI, but you can also assign feeds to folders. If you create a “Feeds” account, then create the folders you want under this, you can then assign feeds to those folders. Andreas of 82 MHz fame, and long-time contributor Rebecca asked how this is done. I really should have described this in more detail, given I said it wasn’t “immediately obvious”. Score one for bad...

Years in the jet teach you one thing above all else: the enemy gets a vote. I spent the better part of my career strapped into an F-16, training day in and day out to be ready when the call came. Air combat doesn’t sit still. Every generation brings new aircraft, new tactics, new threats. For decades, we owned the skies because our platforms, our training, and our operational concepts set the pace. That edge has eroded as near-peer adversaries have built modern fighters and layered air defen...

“One does not simply walk into Mordor.” ― The Lord of the Rings Tongariro Alpine Crossing The Tongariro Alpine Crossing is regarded as among the top ten one-day treks in the world. The hike (or as New Zealanders call them: tramp ) covers 1126 meters of elevation over a distance of 20.2 km and takes between 6 and 8 hours to complete during summer. The extreme weather and an active volcanic landscape make it even more difficult. Some people take it too lightly (as I can attes...

Whenever I have Claude do something for me, I feel nothing about the results. It feels like something happens around me, not through me. That's the new level of abstraction: you stop writing code and start describing intent. You stop crafting and start delegating. I've been doing this professionally long enough to have an opinion, and I don't like what it's doing to me. All of it focuses on getting things done rather than on quality or craft. I'm more productive than I've ever been. ...

La plus grande ville d’un pays bilingue mérite le transport en commun bilingue. Vu l’intérêt prolongé pour la francisation de la ville reine, voici enfin un plan du réseau traduit. Il y a plusieurs ans, un internaut traduisit le plan du réseau de la Société de transport de Montréal . La règle est simple : traduire le nom de chaque station, soit de français en anglais, soit d’anglais en français. Puisque le plan original mélange nos langues nationales, tout traduire le rend ...

Archbot flagged a "blocker" on a PR. It cited the diff, built a plausible chain of reasoning, and suggested a fix. It was completely wrong. Not "LLMs are sometimes wrong" wrong — more like convincing enough that a senior engineer spent 20 minutes disproving it . The missing detail wasn't subtle. It was a guard clause sitting in a helper two files away. Archbot just didn't have that file. That failure mode wasn't a prompt problem. It was a context problem . So I stopped trying to pr...

Concept image showing how Lunar Trailblazer’s remote sensing data was to distinguish between lunar water in the form of ice crystals versus mineral-bound states. Image: Jasper Miura / Lockheed Martin Joe Palca of NPR has reported that the NASA-funded  Lunar Trailblazer  spacecraft, which was lost shortly after its February 2025 launch , failed because its solar panels were pointing perfectly away from the Sun. This chiefly happened because a) the spacecraft vendor Lockheed Martin did n...

How far can you go with IX Route Servers only? On paper internet exchanges (IX) are very simple in their implementation, simply put together a bunch of routers on a shared layer 2 ethernet switch How far can you go with IX Route Servers only? On paper internet exchanges (IX) are very simple in their implementation, simply put together a bunch of routers on a shared layer 2 ethernet switch How far can you go with IX Route Servers only? On paper internet exchanges (IX) are very simp...

How isogenies can solve Bitcoin's Quantum problems How isogenies can solve Bitcoin's Quantum problems

Astrid Eichhorn spends her days thinking about how the laws of physics change at the tiniest scales. Imagine zooming in closer and closer to the device on which you’re reading this article. Its apparently smooth screen quickly dissolves into a jiggling lattice of molecules, which in turn resolve into clouds of electrons buzzing around atomic nuclei. You dive into a nucleus… Source Astrid Eichhorn spends her days thinking about how the laws of physics change at the tiniest scales. Imagine ...

Tech firm fined $1.1m by California for selling high-school students’ data I agree with Brian Marick’s response No such story should be published without a comparison of the fine to the company’s previous year revenue and profits, or valuation of last funding round. (I could only find a valuation of $11.0M in 2017.) We desperately need corporations’ attitudes to shift from “lawbreaking is a low-risk cost of doing business; we get a net profit anyway” to “this could ...

Last week we simulated a queueing algorithm. Behind the scenes, I did this by writing a Go program and placing sleeps to simulate processing. This meant that running a simulation took a while. I ran each one for about a minute, and adding more simulations where I varied parameters took longer and longer. How might we run simulations that don't use the real computer clock? One way to model such a thing is as a stream of events , which is a stream of tuples of (time passed before something ha...

Hello! My big takeaway from last month’s musings about man pages was that examples in man pages are really great, so I worked on adding (or improving) examples to two of my favourite tools’ man pages. Here they are: the dig man page (now with examples) the tcpdump man page examples (this one is an update to the previous examples) the goal: include the most basic examples The goal here was really just to give the absolute most basic examples of how to use the tool, for peop...

Suppose that you have a record of your sales per day. You might want to get a running record where, for each day, you are told how many sales you have made since the start of the year. day sales per day running sales 1 10$ 10 $ 2 15$ 25 $ 3 5$ 30 $ Such an operation is called a prefix sum or a scan. Implementing it in C is not difficult. It is a simple loop. for ( size_t i = 1 ; i data [ 1 ] -> data [ 2 ] -> .....

I didn’t start out as a designer. I started out as a frontend developer. I cared about the craft and spent a lot of time trying to master HTML, CSS, JavaScript and accessibility. Over time, I learned how these technologies affected UX, so as a dev, I started to suggest design changes to improve usability and accessibility. But most of the designers I worked with ignored my suggestions. Years later I transitioned to design. I tried to hide my engineering past because I was worried oth...

tl;dr I use AI heavily on this blog. I don’t use AI to write any content. As any followers of my blog will have seen recently, I am a big fan of the productivity —and enjoyment—that AI can bring to one’s work. (In fact, I firmly believe that to opt out of using AI is a somewhat negative step to take in terms of one’s career.) Here’s how I don’t use AI, and never will : tl;dr I use AI heavily on this blog. ...

There is a certain kind of computer review that is really a permission slip. It tells you what you’re allowed to want. It locates you in a taxonomy — student, creative, professional, power user — and assigns you a product. It is helpful. It is responsible. It has very little interest in what you might become. The MacBook Neo has attracted a lot of these reviews. The consensus is reasonable: $599, A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, stripped-down I/O. A Chromebook killer, a first laptop, a sensible machi...

It’s fine. Many people do it, and you decided to do the same. That’s ok. But don’t attempt to use some wishy-washy argument to justify your actions. You either believe in something and you’re willing to power through, or you don’t, and you do what everybody else is doing. It’s fine to pick option B, but at least have the courage to admit it and don't use some bullshit argument to justify your actions. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email...

I've just released v1.8.0 of Pure Blog , which was the final big feature I wanted to add 1 . At this point, Pure Blog does all the things I would want a useful CMS to do, such as: Storing content in plain markdown, just like an SSG. Easy theme customisations . Hooks for doing clever things when something happens. Data files so I can loop through data to produce pages where I don't have to duplicate effort, like on my blogroll . A couple of simple shortcodes to make my life eas...

Turing Award winner and former Oxford professor  Tony Hoare passed away last Thursday at the age of 92. Hoare is famous for quicksort, ALGOL, Hoare logic and so much more. Jim Miles gives his personal reflections. Jill Hoare, Tony Hoare, Jim Miles. Cambridge, 7 September 2021 Last Thursday (5th March 2026), Tony Hoare passed away, at the age of 92. He made many important contributions to Computer Science, which go well beyond just the one for which most Maths/CompSci undergraduates might know ...

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. Neale Donald Walsch I’m lucky that I have a job where I can work remotely as it allows me to live in a small community where there are no tech jobs anywhere close. It does require me to travel a few weeks per year to the office but I don’t mind that much as I appreciate minor dozes of socializing occasionally. I recently spent five nights on a trip with only a single backpack and it was a surprisingly great experience. How I used...

A recurring concern I've seen regarding LLMs for programming is that they will push our technology choices towards the tools that are best represented in their training data, making it harder for new, better tools to break through the noise. This was certainly the case a couple of years ago, when asking models for help with Python or JavaScript appeared to give much better results than questions about less widely used languages. With the latest models running in good coding agent harnesses...